Tech issues

As many of you know, sadly, that PSU has recently been hit by outages, unresponsive servers, etc. Our tech guys have been working feverishly to locate the issue and we believe we have.

In short, some behind the scenes calculations that are part of our forum mods were killing the servers. Since we have such a large site, large number of posts and members, our points table alone is a massive data volume. This had to be recomputed every day to make sure everyone's accounts were up to date. When this took place, the site dropped out at 11pm EST every day. Additionally, another plug in feature would dump us out for 5 mins or so at other times in the day.

Both have been disabled.

What you might notice gone is Bank Interest. It will no longer be calculated, or awarded. What you have is what you have, no more interest awards.

Second, we have changed a couple of settings to update tables fewer times in the day rather than real time. This will dramatically cut DB load and make PSU more stable.

From this point on, we should not have any more of the daily outages some of us have come to expect.

Over the next few weeks, it is my task to get this resolved with management/site guys. We will be looking at replacing the non-optimized plug ins with some things that will make the experience on PSU more enjoyable for our members. So, if you notice a feature missing, or something went away you are accustomed to seeing, please understand, it might be part of the troubleshooting process to bring stability to PSU.

We will try to keep you informed of our progress on this front, and let you know if there are any major changes going forward!

Awesome. Good news and glad ya'll are on top of it. Besides the frequent internal server errors I know every night from 11pm till 11:30pm this site is down for me so during that time period I could not boot up the site. Glad to see these issues being addressed. Great job guys.

How does collecting interest cause those server errors and why'd it take til now for that to happen?
That's weird.

Basically we had a server database overload and couldn't nail down why. Finally, it was determined that the interest calculation that ran nightly for all 300,000 members of the site was crashing the system because the plug in feature is not optimized for sites this large. There was no mention of the limitation when we bought the plug in, so we are really forced to shut down bank interest to prevent the dump.

As many of you know, sadly, that PSU has recently been hit by outages, unresponsive servers, etc. Our tech guys have been working feverishly to locate the issue and we believe we have.

In short, some behind the scenes calculations that are part of our forum mods were killing the servers. Since we have such a large site, large number of posts and members, our points table alone is a massive data volume. This had to be recomputed every day to make sure everyone's accounts were up to date. When this took place, the site dropped out at 11pm EST every day. Additionally, another plug in feature would dump us out for 5 mins or so at other times in the day.

Both have been disabled.

What you might notice gone is Bank Interest. It will no longer be calculated, or awarded. What you have is what you have, no more interest awards.

Second, we have changed a couple of settings to update tables fewer times in the day rather than real time. This will dramatically cut DB load and make PSU more stable.

From this point on, we should not have any more of the daily outages some of us have come to expect.

Over the next few weeks, it is my task to get this resolved with management/site guys. We will be looking at replacing the non-optimized plug ins with some things that will make the experience on PSU more enjoyable for our members. So, if you notice a feature missing, or something went away you are accustomed to seeing, please understand, it might be part of the troubleshooting process to bring stability to PSU.

We will try to keep you informed of our progress on this front, and let you know if there are any major changes going forward!

-cuguy

Thanks for the heads up friend... Nice to know this will be sorted

Plato and Aristotle, a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Aristotle gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge

but we're only removing it because it has presented itself as a problem. We're not just removing it for the sake of removing it. and if you want to get functional were not removing the feature or disabling it until we can find a fix or find a different system